Quotes By Author: Jennifer Egan

“Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.”

“Alex closed his eyes and listened: a storefront gate sliding down. A dog barking hoarsely. The lowing of trucks over bridges. The velvety night in his ears. And the hum, always that hum, whih maybe wasn’t an echo after all, but the sound of time passing.th blu nytthe stRs u cant cth hum tht nevr gOs awyA sound of clicking heels on the pavement punctured the quiet. Alex snapped open his eyes, and he and Bennie both turned – whirled, really, peering for Sasha in the ashy dark. But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.” (p. 336)”

“You can, Scotty – you have to,’ Bennie said, with his usual calm, but through his thinning silver hair Alex caught a shimmer of sweat on his crown. ‘Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?’Scotty shook his head. ‘The goon won.'” (p. 329)”

“The photos on her page had not done justice to the arresting, wide-eyed symmetry of her face, the radiant shine of her hair. She was ‘clean’: no piercings, tattoos or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos drop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?” (p. 314)”

“He had to find her. But where? Ted deliberated this question while downing three espressos in the hotel lobby, letting the caffeine and vodka greet in his brain like fighting fish. Where to look for Sasha in this sprawling, malodorous city? He reviewed the strategies he’d already failed to execute: approaching dissolute kids at the train station and youth hostels, but no, no. He’d waited too long for any of that.” (p. 224)”

“Sasha wasn’t moving at all. She stood still, watching him. And then she reached for him, encircled Ted with her long arms and clung to him so that he felt her modest bulk, the height and weight of this new Sasha, his grown-up niece who had once been so small, and the irrevocability of that transformation released in Ted a ragged sorrow, so his throat seized up and a painful tingling fizzed in his nostrils,. He cleaved to Sasha. But she was gone, that little girl. Gone with the passionate boy who had loved her. Finally, she pulled away. ‘Wait here,’ she said, not meeting his eyes. ‘I’ll be right back.’ Disoriented, Ted hovered among the dancing Italians until a mounting sense of awkwardness drove him from the floor. He lingered near it. Eventually, he circled the floor. She’s mentioned having friends there – could she be talking to them somewhere? Had she gone outside? Anxious, foggy from his own drink, Ted ordered a San Pellegrino at the bar. And only then, as he reached for his wallet and found it gone, did he realize that she’s robbed him.” (p. 223)”

“Jarred once again by her memory, Ted felt the pressure that arose in him when he tried to talk about his work – a confusion about what had originally driven him to disappoint his parents and rack up mountainous debt so he could write a dissertation claiming (in breathless tones that embarrassed him now) that Cézanne’s distinctive brushstrokes were an effort to represent sound – namely, in his summer landscapes, the hypnotic chant of locusts. ‘I’m writing about the impact of Greek sculpture on the French Impressionists,’ he said, attempting liveliness, but it landed like a brick.” (p. 219)”

“By now it was afternoon. Ted began to walk, still dazed, until he found himself among a skein of backstreets so narrow they felt dark. He passed churches blistered with grime, moldering palazzi whose squalid interiors leaked sounds of wailing cats and children. Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time.” (p. 212)”

“On another day more than twenty years after this one, after Sasha had gone to college and settled in New York; after she’d reconnected on Facebook with her college boyfriend and married late (when Beth had nearly given up hope) and had two children, one of whom was slightly autistic; when she was like anyone, with a life that worried and electrified and overwhelmed her, Ted, long divorced – a grandfather – would visit Sasha at home in the Californian desert. He would step through a living room strewn with the flotsam of her young kids and watch the western sun blaze through a sliding glass door. And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he’d felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire.Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light.”See,” Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. “It’s mine.” (p. 229-230)”

“Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time.”

“Time’s a goon right? Isn’t that the expression?”

“I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I honestly don’t.” … “You grew up, Alex.”

“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.”

“That’s what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.”

“Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.”